


Sweet, Sweet Home

by halotolerant



Category: Crimson Petal and the White - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Bechdel Test Pass, F/F, Families of Choice, Female Characters, Female Protagonist, Fluff, Happy Ending, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Sweetheart lead her out from Before, drew her from that Vale of Sorrows and Shadow of Death. Sweetheart did not have wings, not really, but she gave them to Agnes all the same.'</p><p>Agnes, Sugar and Sophie live Happily Ever After.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet, Sweet Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [norgbelulah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/gifts).



> **Additional Warnings Apply** : Reference to disordered eating past and present. 
> 
> **Note** : This is based on the TV series canon i.e. using the information and only the information from the TV series rather than that which can be added from the book or sequel. Yes, it handwaves certain problems - I don't know, maybe it's a fantasy story written by one of the women, but sometimes I think the end frame of the last episode invites this idea.
> 
> Dear Recipient - I was so thrilled to spot a prompt with someone wanting something about Sugar and Agnes, honestly I have wanted to write them the happiest of happy endings ever since I first encountered canon. I hope this fest of fluff is something you like, but thank you so much in any case for prompting!

Agnes does not remember everything about Before, and it’s not as if she has any wish to.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there’s the edge of a dream, an echo of pain, a glimpse into something dark and spiralling, a place where once she sank and suffocated.

She twists over in the bed, startling, shuffling, and strives to get her eyes open and look about her, blinking. 

And now everything is well again, because she is Home, and Sweetheart is lying next to her in the bed, sleeping peacefully. Outside the window, an owl hoots. Agnes pictures it, gliding on the wing, free and mighty, and she (whispering, she does not want to wake Sweetheart) hoots a little reply, and lies back smiling. 

Sweetheart’s hair, long and dark red and smelling of sea-lavender, has edged onto Agnes’ pillow, and Agnes turns her face into it and breathes. 

Once she thought Sweetheart an angel, a heavenly angel from another realm. And she excuses herself that, because in comparison to those who surrounded her once, Sweetheart merits that description. 

But she knows now that Sweetheart is as human as she herself is, and as warm, and Agnes enjoys sleeping next to her. Once Agnes kept her bed a fortress, a place to be (unsuccessfully) defended, a place of relative safety and yet therefore a place from which to fear assault, a place that was finally a prison, when the medicine dissolved her, and all was blurred and powerless. 

That was Before. Not here, at Home. 

Sweetheart lead her out from Before, drew her from that Vale of Sorrows and Shadow of Death. Sweetheart did not have wings, not really, but she gave them to Agnes all the same. 

(When Agnes talks of wings, of birds, of angels, Sweetheart does not frown or mumble or make Agnes feel that she ought to be ashamed. No, Sweetheart listens, smiles, conjures with her the words that make the beautiful places in her head, and sometimes Agnes will realise that she has eaten an entire bowl of porridge and not minded. Agnes still worries, a little, about food, because eating brings the bleeding from the belly, which is messy and alarming, but it emerges – wonder of wonders! – that this also happens to Sweetheart so it cannot be so bad, perhaps, and when it hurts Sweetheart rubs her back and that is always pleasant.)

Agnes was alone a little while, at first, before Sweetheart and Sophiedarling found her. She had taken a train seeking the Convent of Health, and found a very pleasant church where the vicar and his wife had welcomed her into their home (not Home, though, not Home, Agnes had known that), and Agnes had wondered when the nuns would come to collect her. 

But they didn’t need to, you see, because Sweetheart and Sophiedarling came instead. The Convent of Health is still there, if ever Agnes needs it, but she doesn’t think she will, not at least until she is very old, and she prays now for the other women in need, and that they may be borne there just as she herself once was, out of the horror of the night of Before.

Now Agnes has Home, this small cottage near the sea, with the garden and the vegetable patch and her flock of hens, which will never, never, never be killed, but simply lay them beautiful eggs every day (and it would be impolite, Sweetheart points out, not to eat them). Each morning Sweetheart walks out along the road to the school where she teaches, Sophiedarling’s hand in hers, and Agnes rolls her sleeves up and looks with pleasure on the things she can polish and scrub before lunch (Sweetheart leaves a plate, and Agnes has made a solemn promise, and only sometimes gives the hens the crusts, because crusts are so chewy and the hens so imploring) and then later she writes or sketches, always something new for when the others get home. Sweetheart is writing another book for children - the first sold well, they are told - and Agnes paints the illustrations, taking them from life, from the small animals she finds around her in the countryside.

Sophiedarling calls both Agnes and Sweetheart ‘Mama’, and Agnes hopes Sweetheart does not mind this (her child to think of Agnes also as a mother) but Sweetheart doesn’t speak of it and truly it makes Agnes happy to be so elevated.  She cannot do much of what Sweetheart does for the child (or at least, she fears to, still, a little, to combine a child's questioning with her own uncertain understanding), but she is the better seamstress, and though neither of them could cook when first they came Home, Agnes has become the more proficient, and she has found she loves it when Sophiedarling begs her for her jam tarts.

In the evenings, by the fire in the small parlour – the cottage is snug, thick-walled, exactly the right size for the three of them – they take turns reading to each other, and Agnes can help Sophiedarling with her words just as much as Sweetheart. The first time Sophiedarling wanted to sit on Agnes’ lap as she read, Sweetheart hushed her and told her to wait, but Agnes found she was not afraid of it.

Before, Agnes remembers shying from being touched, remembers dreams of fingers. Hard, sharp, spangles of pain, deep in her core. Pinched-tight clothes. Pain in her head, trapped, trapped in her head and in her house and unable to breathe.

Here at Home, she will put her arms round Sophiedarling as she stands at the doorway watching the sunset, or take Sweetheart’s hand to be helped over a muddy path on their long weekend walks, and it is nothing, and that is freedom.

And at night, sometimes, Sweetheart will move to hold her, fitting along her side like two gloves in a drawer, and Agnes finds she likes it, finds it warms her, finds a pleasant glow settling in her belly. 

(“Do you want to kiss me?” Agnes asked Sweetheart a little while ago, uncertain. Sweetheart frowned and looked anxious. “Do you want me to?” she’d asked in replied. And Agnes had thought about it and had said, “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe soon. Would that matter?” and Sweetheart had taken up her hand and kissed that instead, and Agnes thought that meant all was well.)

Soon it will be Sophiedarling’s birthday, her tenth, and Agnes is making her a kite of scraps of wood and fabric, with the longest most colourful tail in the world, and it will fly high on the wind over the cliffs, dancing as sometimes, sometimes, one may see a dolphin dancing in the water below, rippling and exulting and Agnes will run after it as long as she pleases, laughing...

“Agnes? Agnes, are you alright? Did you have a bad dream?”

It is Sweetheart, stirring next to her, voice thick with sleep. 

Agnes shifts back down under the covers and turns to her, and shakes her head. “A little one, but I am quite alright now.”

“You know you may tell me anything? You know that I will love you no matter what happens?”

Agnes has heard Sweetheart say this before, to Sophiedarling as well as to herself. And as time has passed she has truly begun to believe it, and with that belief comes something that must be like a bird feels at the apex of flight, the joy of that. 

“I know, Sweetheart,” she says softly now. “But truly. It was a little shiver, and it has passed, because I remembered that you saved me.”

She hears Sweetheart let out a rapid breath. “In the end, I did. I should have done better.” Sweetheart sighs again, long and pained. "It was for the... the children, you see, I thought..."

Agnes reaches out to find her hand and hold it. In their Home, you are allowed to say what you are thinking, and if it does not make immediate sense to everyone else, that is still fine.

“You are perfect,” Agnes tells her, determined. She had not thought of Sweetheart being confused, but she must be, just a little. “You are perfect, and, and...”

This is how one says it, of course. Agnes can see that now. An echo of a time before Before, a book of words not her own, a book called a romance, a dream of a sigh, a wish, and this, _this_ is how it is supposed to be, this is how you say this thing she never has.

“And I love you,” Agnes says softly, and then, remembering. “No matter what happens.”

Sweetheart moves – not quickly, she is so gentle – and puts arms round her, and Agnes relaxes into them, and strokes Sweetheart’s back as she strokes her own, and falls sweetly, easily, safely back to sleep, ready to welcome tomorrow.

 

 


End file.
